William S. McFeely, whose biography of Ulysses S. Grant won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, sheds new light on the famed Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins. McFeely sets the evocative melancholy of his portraits, particularly of women, in the context of the artist’s struggle with depression and sexual identity. He also places Eakins in the company of his contemporaries: Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, with whom Eakins formed an abiding friendship.